A new years resolution for 2015

I just read the last post from dadhacker, where he’s teaching his son emacs. Which, rarely as I do it, got me to thinking…

vi, the enemy I fraternitize with

I used to be totally anti-vi. But actually, when I am administrating systems, I am always using vi. This - embarassingly - has been going on for years now.

vi, which I still hate! Except for the h j k l cursor movement, which I really think is superior to regular cursor keys. In all other aspects, vi is otherwise an unfathomable editing hell experience for me.

When playing computer games I use the vi cursor layout (transposed to s d f g) instead of using w a s d like everybody else. I would guess, that my ability to play Quake 3 a bit better then my colleagues then, was mostly due to my ability, to go backwards as forwards with the same ease.

So vi is a constant source of annoyance, but I am using it, because

• well, it’s always there
• I somehow hate nano even more
• emacs starts too slow for multiple quick edits runs in the same terminal
• the expectancy with vi for me is, that I am gonna use it just really quickly for a few quick edits on a system.
• emacs comes with a slew of dependencies, none of which I want
• I know of no other editors, that are available everywhere.

Write my own editor ?

My usual solution to a problem is “write it yourself”. So what would a good terminal editor look like ? I think it would be a micro-emacs. Nowadays - as I have gotten lazier - before I start coding I check, if maybe something like it already exists ?

Why yes, MicroEMACS does already exist. And apparently since 1985, LOL.

Even better there is a branch that is maintained by Linus Torvalds. Which is pure-C and compiles without any configure just with make.

So as a new years resolution, I will install uemacs on all my systems and will try to not call vi anymore.

I already failed

As I notice that I am editing this into jekyll yaml with …. ARGH!!! Whip myself!

This weblog stuff is currently typed into Mou. Then I am writing the contents down to a file and manually append the jekyll YAML in front of it. It’s all in transition…

And em failed me too now

OK, don’t just write about it. Install em for real. And do it…

Application Specific Information:
detected source and destination buffer overlap

Thread 0 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
0   libsystem_kernel.dylib        	0x00007fff8939f866 __pthread_kill + 10
1   libsystem_pthread.dylib       	0x00007fff93b7235c pthread_kill + 92
2   libsystem_c.dylib             	0x00007fff8a954b1a abort + 125
3   libsystem_c.dylib             	0x00007fff8a954c91 abort_report_np + 181
4   libsystem_c.dylib             	0x00007fff8a978860 __chk_fail + 48
5   libsystem_c.dylib             	0x00007fff8a978870 __chk_fail_overlap + 16
6   libsystem_c.dylib             	0x00007fff8a9788a1 __chk_overlap + 49
7   libsystem_c.dylib             	0x00007fff8a978a6c __strcpy_chk + 64
8   em                            	0x000000010029b900 0x100293000 + 35072
9   em                            	0x000000010029c5b5 0x100293000 + 38325
10  em                            	0x000000010029ccd1 0x100293000 + 40145
11  em                            	0x00000001002a389b 0x100293000 + 67739
12  libdyld.dylib                 	0x00007fff893cc5fd start + 1

Freaking hilarious…

And fixed it

uemacs on Mulle kybernetiK has a fix now to run uemacs on 10.9 and beyond. uemacs is fairly old C code and it shows in some places.

^X ^D for saving the file is something I hate already. I want this to be ^S (or at worst ^X ^S) and ^Q for quit.